Rule 34
by Lirillith
Summary: Ivan discovers Hero TV fandom and finds it kind of unsettling.


Notes: I wrote this for the Trope Bingo challenge on Dreamwidth: This is just my way of filling the hooker/porn/stripper square without having any of the characters actually strip, take up prostitution, or star in porn. At least, outside of the imaginations of the fans. No one in this has any real sex, though there's slightly implied Ivan/Pao-lin.

I'm not familiar with RPF/reality fandoms, so here's hoping my imagined Hero TV fandom isn't _too _far off the mark.

A few of the pieces of fanart described are composites based on art I saw on Pixiv; all the fanfics are entirely imaginary, and any resemblance to any real fics, WIP or completed, is purely coincidental.

* * *

.

* * *

Looking back, Ivan realized he was probably a lot less scandalized than his sister. "omg vanya LOOK AT THIS" she'd typed in the subject line. The link, in the email body, was a URL shortened for Pwitter posting; she must have gotten it directly from there.

Years on the internet had taught Ivan never to click the links, but this was Katya. He was pretty sure his little sister wasn't going to send him goatse. So he clicked.

The site seemed innocuous enough. Black text on white background, purple and gray and and red; what was so disturbing here? The title of the article seemed to be "Hero Worship."

_Fandom: Hero TV. _

Oh. _Oh. _Fanfic. That was why the interface looked familiar, though they'd given it a bit of a facelift since the days when he was browsing for Naruto stories. Oh, well, no wonder Katya was kind of disturbed. The idea of fanfic had kind of thrown him, too, at first, and… this was… This was Hero TV fanfic, so it was especially jarring…

_Pairing: BBJ/Origami._

And that was when the train-wreck syndrome kicked in.

The first fic was actually very tame; Katya's friends must have wanted to make her laugh, not scar her for life, though the one they'd picked made him wonder if she was keeping his secret identity as secret as she'd promised to. In the fic, Origami was filled with angst because he was in love with Barnaby and had been since their academy days, but he didn't think he had anything to offer the amazing, wonderful Barnaby. It would have been kind of insulting if not for the fact that he knew people wrote fic like this about their favorite characters, not their least favorite.

He couldn't really comment on the quality of the writing, because he kept bursting into incredulous laughter and walking away from his desk, only to come back. It wasn't that it was a bad fanfic, or even that it was all that far off the way he might really think when things weren't going so well, if he'd been pining after Barnaby. He might have actually written a fic like that about Rock Lee pining for Sakura back when he was thirteen, and he'd definitely thought about it. It was the fact that _he _was the star of the fic — well, sort of — that made it so hilarious.

Four hours later, after learning what a kink meme was and figuring out how to read one, Ivan realized his apartment had gotten dark around him and his stomach was rumbling. He snapped on lights on his way to the kitchen, and it felt a little like breaking a spell. Ivan felt pretty sure he should have anticipated that he'd be the uke when he was paired with a guy; after all, there'd be a lot of overlap between fans of him and fans of anime and manga, and while Ivan had never gotten into yaoi, he'd picked up things about it just by osmosis. A lot of his online friends had been girls before he went to the Academy and kind of dropped out of fandom.

He got paired with Barnaby a lot, because the fans knew they were both academy alumni. He got paired with Sky High sometimes, because the difference in their rankings was apparently _filled _with drama and sexual tension; he couldn't think of any other reason, since he doubted the fans knew they were friendly. Unless one of them had mentioned it in an interview? He had _not_ anticipated that he'd be paired up with Blue Rose so often, but there seemed to be an impression that he photobombed her so much because he was obsessed with her and not just because she was on camera a lot. He also wasn't totally surprised he got paired up with Pao-lin, because they _did _work together a lot, and he'd mentioned in a couple of interviews that they were friendly.

He hadn't expected the fans to operate on the unshakeable belief that he was actually Japanese. That was kind of… surprising. Apparently the Academy's students all took the NDAs they had to sign _really_ seriously, if no one had leaked that he was probably the whitest hero in the cast.

So that was interesting. They were pretty vague about describing him other than "he's Japanese," but that was kind of par for the course in fanfic, wasn't it? Not much point to describing characters when everyone knew what they looked like. Except with half of the heroes, they didn't know. They knew what Barnaby looked like, and Tiger, at least with his mask. Dragon Kid and Blue Rose, too; the fans seemed to work on the assumption that the girls had blue and green hair all the time, not just in costume. Half of Fire Emblem's face was visible, so they knew he was black and knew he wore lipstick; they seemed to agree he was bald, for some reason. Then you had Origami, of course, and Bison and Sky High.

Ivan had more or less been peeking between his fingers as he read some of the more explicit fics, especially early on, so he might have missed descriptions of them, but he knew he'd read one fic where Tiger, um, pleasured Bison without Bison taking off any more of his suit than he had to. So that was one way around it, he guessed. Others just seemed to envision whatever the hell they wanted. Keith had "flowing chestnut locks" or a crewcut. One time he was Pakistani (that was a pretty detailed fic; Ivan had saved it to read later once he realized how long it was) and another time he was Latino and Bison was a blond, blue-eyed, corn-fed (that was the word the fic used) farm boy from Kansas.

So it was a mix. No point to describing Barnaby when you could see his ten times before you even got on the subway, and for the helmeted heroes, probably every fan had their own mental image. It was like character voices in a book or a manga, and the way that some fans would always be unhappy with casting for an adaptation. On the kink meme, he'd seen fans actually specifying — "_not _a fan of blond!Bison," or "can we get some POC heroes in here? getting sick of white FCs." He wasn't totally sure what an FC was, but the general sentiment was clear enough. Fan-casting, he decided, or maybe fan-character?

* * *

That was the first day he spent down the rabbit hole (which was the title of _another _fic, which mostly seemed to be about everybody fucking Barnaby without really asking, though Ivan had gotten too creeped out to keep reading it before Tiger had even achieved penetration so if there was any plot, he'd missed it.)

Most of the fics weren't actually unalloyed smut. There were a lot like that first one Katya had sent him; a lot of kissing, holding hands, if they even got that far. There were fics about Sky High rescuing kittens from trees. The thing was, while it felt very strange reading stories like that about yourself, or your friends, it wasn't uncomfortable. What was _uncomfortable _was reading about someone with your name (who looked nothing like you and only acted a little like your blog persona) having very intimate, loving sex with someone based on a friend of yours. Or very kinky BDSM sex with someone based on a friend of yours.

On day two, he got curious about a mention, in author's notes, of "my FC for Origami," a Japanese actor whose name Ivan vaguely recognized. Some of the writers seemed to have put a lot of effort into finding actors Ivan had never heard of to be the heroes. It confused him for a little while, until he noticed that one author varied her casting. She didn't think Sky High was _actually _Tracy Bacon, she just sometimes wrote on the assumption that they looked identical, and other times that Sky High looked like Don Rhodes.

Two hours of hopping from blog to blog, tag to tag, looking at pictures of actors (mostly Japanese, though there were a couple of K-pop stars sprinkled in there) people envisioned him as; sometimes they'd photoshop the actor's head into a shot with his armor. Sometimes they'd draw him. That was another branch, of course, looking for fanart. Looking for doujinshi.

He knew better than to try that. He had a tendency to get caught up in buying Origami Cyclone merchandise — trading cards, action figures, imported gashapon toys and keychains — and doujinshi were an expensive habit. He didn't want to spend twenty to thirty Stern a pop just to watch the fictional uke version of him get molested by a giant Barnaby twice his size. He went back to the fanfic. A couple of the stories had been really good, honestly, funny and even romantic, if you put aside the fact they were about people he knew.

When Agnes called him into action that evening — armed robbery at a football game, very exciting, Ivan stood no chance in hell of getting the arrest — he couldn't make eye contact with anyone. Same thing at the training center the next day. He knew perfectly well that he'd never begged Sky High to ejaculate all over his face, and he knew no one could actually see him thinking about it, but he couldn't get the image out of his mind, no matter how many videos of kittens he looked at.

That meant he should _absolutely not _go looking for Japanese fanart.

The problem was, he _knew _Hero TV was big in Japan. Heknew because he'd gotten a chance to talk to the translation team and ask them to use keigo for him if possible. He'd ordered the action figures and the gashapon toys and the cell phone charms, and he'd read scanlations of the 4-koma manga. He'd written about the 4-koma on his blog. And he'd seen Japanese fanart for live-action films before. He knew it existed. Hell, given how much they resembled sentai shows at this point thanks to their suits, it was barely even live-action anymore. There'd be fanart.

There'd be tentacle porn, and lactation, and all kinds of bodily fluids, and crossdressing, and futanari, and guro, and whatever they thought Ivan looked like under his mask they'd draw him as a tiny, weeping uke.

It was the "under the mask" part that decided it. Against his better judgment, he searched out the Japanese rendering of everyone's names. Origami in kanji, Cyclone in katakana; everyone else was pretty much straight up katakana renderings of their names, though Barnaby was also "BBJ" sometimes.

It wasn't as bad as Ivan had feared. There were a lot of perfectly innocuous drawings of them in hero suits, or running around in various casual outfits while wearing their helmets. A lot of the drawings of Origami had him in a yukata (with his helmet,) since it was summer; sometimes they were all attending a summer festival together. There were drawings of him in a formal kimono, of Dragon Kid in a qipao. Tiger in Japanese traditional clothes too; had Tiger publicized that he was Japanese-American? And sure enough, in speech bubbles Origami used "de gozaru" and the -dono suffix. Ivan's Japanese wasn't that good, but he recognized those.

There were drawing of all of the girls, and sometimes Nathan, in formal women's kimono. There were a million drawings of the girls in all kinds of moe-tastic outfits. He nearly choked when he found Blue Rose and Dragon Kid in school uniforms (and thigh-high stockings; zettai ryouiki!) that looked a lot like Karina's real school uniform. Then again, pleated skirt, tie at the neck, kind of a brown color scheme… a lot of school uniforms fit that bill. It was just coincidence.

_Okay, step away from the short skirts, Karelin._ He was just getting a general survey of what was around here. There were chibis. There were ads — oh, summer Comiket, maybe? There were doujinshi samples. All of them in high school, wearing uniforms, and their helmets or headgear and in Tiger's case his mask. Whatever they were doing — going to high school, playing basketball, playing soccer, playing musical instruments — they'd all be wearing their helmets or masks or headpieces. It was starting to really crack him up, which he was sure was the idea; the fandom seemed to care at least as much about jokes as it did about relationships and porn.

There was Tiger with tiger ears and a tail, and Barnaby with bunny ears and a tail — hah, that joke _did _get translated, then — and an anthropomorphic cow he couldn't figure out until he found a drawing of it with Bison's drills on his shoulders. He honestly really wanted to go tell everyone about what he'd been finding. He could make a blog entry out of this, definitely.

There was less porn in art, where it was easy to identify, than there had been in the prose stories. Or maybe it just seemed that way because it was easier to just glance at twenty different things quickly? He found a large-breasted Blue Rose digging her spike heels into a kneeling Barnaby's back; he found something with Fire Emblem and Rock Bison that, going by the placement of the mysterious glowing white patches, was probably a preview of porn; he found a confusing topless blond woman who turned out to be Barnaby as a girl; he found Blue Rose getting bukkake'd by Pepsi. But those were scattered in amongst ten times as many straightforward drawings, and animal-eared chibis, and photos of omelettes with ketchup drawings of heroes.

When people wanted to draw faces, usually if they were trying to do something more dramatic and relationship-focused, they either obscured the top half of the face, or left out the eyes. No fan-casting here; most of the heroes (except Barnaby) were faceless if they weren't wearing their helmets and masks. He probably should have expected that, too. Maybe he was just being a nerd, but that way of doing it made more sense to him than the photoshops he'd seen of real actors.

And then, out of nowhere, the yin and yang of porn: one drawing of Origami Cyclone (it wasn't of _Ivan_) with fox ears and tail and pixelated penis, having sex with cow-ears-and-tail Bison. Bison's helmet and Origami's shuriken were in the background. The very next image was of Dragon Kid as a bustier-than-real-life dragon-girl — she had dragon-y ears and a pair of antlers, like a Chinese dragon's, on top of her head in lieu of her headpiece — in see-through lace lingerie.

He closed out his browser and went to the kitchen to make green tea.

_I could always put a post-it note on the screen to cover the yaoi, _he thought. Neither was really all that bizarre compared to some hentai he'd seen, and he was honestly thinking about doing something about the guilty boner he was sporting. It wasn't like the image really had anything to do with the real Pao-lin, and it wasn't like she'd ever even know it existed.

And it wasn't like she was psychic and had deliberately chosen that moment to call him, so it was purely coincidence when his phone rang and he spilled tea all over his hands and the floor, yowled in pain, and had to run cold water over his hands while trying to answer his phone.

"Ivan, is everything okay?"

"I'm fine! I just… long story, I burned my hand, no big deal," he babbled. "What's up?"

"Do you need a minute?"

"I'm fine," he repeated, then on impulse, "and again, fine," just to make her laugh. "I'll be okay. It wasn't boiling. Green tea's better when the water's below boiling?" That was what he'd heard, though he'd never gotten up the nerve to attend a tea ceremony and see how it was really done.

"Okay," she said, which was clearly the end of that topic. "I was just calling to see if you wanted to come out for dinner with me and Karina? There's this sushi place she likes, and you like sushi, and you've been acting kind of weird all week so I thought maybe you needed cheering up."

Not cheering up, so much, but maybe he needed to step away from all the art and stories of imaginary versions of all his friends touching each other inappropriately. Karina had always kind of intimidated him — back in regular school, girls like her either ignored or laughed at his group of friends — but if he didn't leave he'd just feel worse, like a creepy loser turning down real people to spend more time looking at porn. "Sure," he said. "That sounds good. Do you need a ride, or should I meet you there?"

* * *

He met them there. He still couldn't really look them in the face, especially knowing that they'd noticed he'd been acting strange, but being in the real world, surrounded by people wearing clothes and not sucking on parts of each other, had sunk in by the time the first plate had arrived, and he managed eye contact with Pao-lin.

Which might have been a mistake. "So come on, Ivan, spill," Karina said, noticing he'd looked up from the crane he'd made out of his napkin. "What's the matter?"

"Karina!" Pao-lin hissed.

"What? I'm curious."

"It's… hard to explain." Especially in front of Pao-lin. In front of both girls. It might have been easier with some of the male heroes? Maybe not. "Um. Do you know what fanfic is?"

Karina burst out laughing, and Pao-lin's brow wrinkled in confusion. "Now it makes sense!" Karina exclaimed. "It's not just me."

"Wait, you _do _know?"

She nodded. Pao-lin was looking from one to the other of them like she was following a tennis match. "My friends and I are fans of Blue Rose, so we went looking for websites one time… I mean, I was curious about what people said about me, you know?" He nodded. "And next thing I know we're looking at… well, you know."

"_I _don't know!" Pao-lin protested.

"Um… maybe we could explain later?" Ivan suggested. He just knew that if they tried to explain here, they'd be in the middle of talking about strap-ons or paizuri when the waiter came by. Pao-lin frowned, and Karina leaned in to whisper to her. Then Pao-lin's eyes widened, and Ivan had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing at her expression.

"Okay!" she said. "Let's, uh, let's talk about food now! Food sure is great!"

"What I mean is," Karina said, grinning. "I know exactly how you feel."

"It was kind of cool, in a way," Ivan said. Her eyebrow twitched and the condensation on her water glass frosted over. "Not the stories!"

"I was _going to say."_

"The ones I found were all, uh, two guys," he said. "Not Blue Rose." Well, mostly. He wasn't going to risk her wrath with total honesty, though.

"Really? Like… you and…?"

"Origami and Barnaby… Barnaby and Tiger?" Another twitch, but he couldn't help that. It was out there. "Origami and Sky High. Fire Emblem and _everybody_."

Karina laughed. "He'd like that."

"I know. …but what I meant was, uh, the descriptions, and the art, seeing how different people work around not knowing what all our faces look like…"

"I didn't think they paid much attention to _faces,_" Karina said, and Ivan realized she'd probably just found the kind of Blue Rose fic that seemed like it was typed one-handed and used the word "tits" constantly, not the kind with twenty thousand words of her and Barnaby gradually baring their souls to each other while they were trapped in a collapsed subway tunnel. He was afraid she'd murder him if he told her about the second kind of fic, at least the fact they often involved Barnaby (bickering meant sexual tension!) but he _did _look up fanart on his phone to show her what he meant about the faces. So instead of talking about bodily fluids, they were laughing at cow-Bison when the waiter came by next.

"So it's not all…" Pao-lin trailed off. "That's good. I'd be really freaked out if people were writing stories like that about _me." _

Ivan wasn't about to tell her they actually were. Karina caught his eye for a second, and nodded almost imperceptibly. "I'm just lucky," she said. "And Ivan, I guess."

"I'll find you some Dragon Kid fanart," he offered. There were plenty of perfectly innocent drawings to show her. "A lot of it's really cute."

She wrinkled her nose. "Cute. Ugh. Isn't there anything ferocious-looking?"

"I'll see what I can find."


End file.
